Commission Junction: Profitable and Easy Affiliate Programs
Written: May 28 '00 (Updated May 28 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Many affiliate programs, pooled earnings, pays monthly, good search function
Cons: Slow customer service
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| jiwhite's Full Review: Commission Junction |
As a Webmaster, being a member of Commission Junction has been very profitable for me. The variety of affiliate programs offered through Commission Junction combined with my ability to generate hundreds of unique visitors per day is currently making me $20 to $30 per day. However, whether your website is generating 10s or 1000s of page views per day, I suggest that you take a look at Commission Junction as a possible source of revenue for your web site.
What is an Affiliate Program?
Commission Junction lists hundreds of affiliate programs. Companies want to buy advertising space on web sites. They may pay for impressions, clickthroughs, leads or sales. An impression is the display of an advertisement, text or graphics. A clickthrough is when someone clicks on the advertisement and goes to the sponsor's web site. A lead occurs when the person who clicks through gives contact information, such as name and email address. Companies may also offer to pay commission on sales, either a set amount per transaction or a percentage of sales for each sale generated by a clickthrough or over the course of a customer's lifetime with the company. Each affiliate program states how much it is willing to pay for which service. For example, one may pay $.01 per clickthrough while another may pay $1 per lead, or both.
How It Works
It is very easy to join affiliate programs. After registering your web site with Commission Junction, the next step is to find affiliate programs that are appropriate to your web site. You can search by keyword and affiliate types or browse through listings. Once you've found the affiliate programs you're interested in hosting on your site, you apply to those programs by clicking the "Join Program" button. Many affiliate programs automatically accept applicants. Others choose to individually review applicant to be sure that they are appropriate to host their advertising. Once you are accepted by an affiliate program, you choose the forms of advertising that you want to use, email link, text link, banners of various sizes, search boxes, multimedia content or shopping links. The HTML code you need to insert in your web site is provided. You insert it into your site and see how much earnings your web site generates. Commission junction can support multiple web sites.
Advantages
Pooled Earnings
The advantage of a program like Commission Junction is that it brings many affiliate programs together in one place. Both the webmasters and sponsors have the advantage of tracking may affiliates or affiliate programs together. Commission Junction is special in that it sends one check per month for your earnings from all of the affiliate programs. Any month where your combined earning are over $25 you are sent a check. Otherwise, your balance is rolled over to the next month. Other programs only provide one place to sign up for many affiliate programs or provide unified reporting, but do not provide unified payment. It is much easier to earn the minimum required to have a check sent when the earnings are pooled across programs. Also, other programs only pay quarterly, rather than monthly, so you may have to wait much longer to be paid.
Reports
Commission Junction provides many ways to monitor how well the your links are doing. There is an individual transaction report across a range of dates you can specify that is downloadable as a CSV file. There are also various forms of aggregate reports where you can compare your links across web sites, affiliate programs and types of links by month, quarter and year.
Disadvantage
Proprietary Email
The only disadvantage I've found to Commission Junction is that they tend to have slow Customer service. I sometimes have to email them several time to get a response. They have a proprietary email system accessible from their web site which is very good for keeping you up to date on new affiliate programs as they join and any rate changes that the affiliate programs institute, but the outgoing email doesn't seem to be as reliable, so it can be frustrating.
Overall
If you are new to affiliate programs or have a web site that doesn't generate a lot of traffic, Commission Junction is a great place to learn about affiliate programs. Programs are easy to find and links are easy to generate. There are many reports available for tracking your progress. If you have a question, just be persistent. You may want to contact the affiliate programs directly if appropriate rather than going through Commission Junction Customer Service. Payment is monthly after only $25 in earnings, so you're likely to be able to generate income with only 10s of visitors a day. Good Luck!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jiwhite
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Member: Janine White
Location: Chandler, AZ
Reviews written: 194
Trusted by: 142 members
About Me:
Criminologist turned Software Engineer
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